Comments on: UIEtips: Spending Quality Time with Your Search Loghttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/06/09/time_search/
UIE\'s latest insights on the world of designTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:15:55 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1By: Scott Armstronghttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/06/09/time_search/comment-page-1/#comment-150586
Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:00:30 +0000http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/?p=1333#comment-150586Awesome post and article Jared. Smart and valuable advice. We are big fans of spending time in your search data but I admit we cheat by using marketing automation to make it easier to refine your inbound and outbound marketing strategy!

I just linked to it from a post on “B2B Marketing: How to understand what your customer wants to know”. It is a great technical and site optimization take on the same idea.

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Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:09:21 +0000http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/?p=1333#comment-149727[...] here: UIEtips: Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log » UIE Brain Sparks Share and [...]
]]>By: Rachel Pottshttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/06/09/time_search/comment-page-1/#comment-149695
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:08:46 +0000http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/?p=1333#comment-149695Interesting article:-)
At Red Gate began looking at our search data in Google Analytics around a year ago – particularly with a view to improving findability of our technical documentation. It has since become an invaluable part of our understanding of what our users are trying to do, and how our content is performing at supporting them in doing it.
(I wrote up some of my early thoughts about this here: http://communicationcloud.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/what-can-web-analytics-do-for-technical-communications/)

Looking at this search data also highlighted the problems with our current search – to the extent that we’re now running a project to replace the search engine and change the way that we incorporate knowledge about search behaviour into our continuous improvement programmes. In particular, we’ve acknowledged that search logs or search data aren’t something you can look at once, to check the search is working when you implement it; instead you need to keep checking back on what people are trying to do and how well they’re able to do it – as users encounter new problems, and new content is published.

Rachel

]]>By: Vegard Sandvoldhttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/06/09/time_search/comment-page-1/#comment-149683
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:48:18 +0000http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/?p=1333#comment-149683From the article: If one of your top terms is a category, users might be more successful with that as a navigation element, not requiring search.

True, and I would also like to add that general search terms are good indicators of suitable categories and facets for query clarification and refinement. When searching for “salsa music”, I would like to find music as a search result category, and salsa as an option in a genre facet. Similar for “cancer treatment” search.

If you are tracking clicks from the search you can identify search terms that have poor results. Normally this is because you don’t have the content, or search doesn’t return relevant results. Often it is caused by your visitors using different language than you do on your site. This is valuable to know and can be remedied by either using that language on your site using synonyms so the correct content can be found.

You kind of touched on this – you should use your search logs to come up with candidate names for your navigational links – because it is the language of your visitors. For example if you call a category “canine” but you see your visitors searching for “dogs”, then you should probably rename the link. It is more likely to trigger an action if it is in the language of your customers.

Finally – you don’t have to go through the logs to get this information. A decent site search should come with this sort of reporting and their are analytics packages (including the free Google Analytics) that will provide much of this.